How do you define "Free Will"?

Question

To me it would mean that you have the ability to make a decision that is not caused or determined by anything (including brain activity and sensory input).

Answer 1

Hi XXL,

You already know my feelings on Free Will, but for he sake of a concise definition, Free Will is:

The power of making choices unconstrained by external agencies.

As you know, while this is as I and many of philosophy define it, I do not believe that it exist. This does not, mean that I think we can not choose for ourselves. It merely means that I believe our choices are acted upon by external forces, they are influenced by stimuli, they are bound by the laws of nature (which are the laws God) and they have resulting consequence. As such they are not free from external agencies.

Answer 2

He is a large mammal that lives in the arctic ocean. He was captured by promoters, who were trying to start a marine world and was treated poorly. Then one day a kid realized he had to do something about it and through a series of unlikely events, found a way to free the animal. He got free and went on to make a number of sequels...........

Oh Free "WILL" sorry.

Free will is the ability to follow a dream or an idea, without some one or something holding you back. It is wonderful and what America is all about. Christians will most likely catagorize it as God's way of letting us make enough mistakes to get sent to Hell.

Answer 3

Conditional self-determination. A property apparently applicable to quantum events, as it happens.

EDIT:

Yes, self-determination must be acausal... or rather autocausal. Of course that simply identifies a mystery, rather than disclosing its content: WHY this decision rather than that? Nondeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics say there is simply no answer to that question.

And yes, many people are investigating the possibility that human freewill is related to quantum events in the brain. Google "Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR" and you'll find lots of examples. Others say that macroscale brain processes would cancel out quantum indeterminacy on a cellular level. IMHO we could relocate self-determination to the self-polarization of multidimensional zero-point field wavefunctions which underlie the phenomenology of matter-energy events.

Answer 4

The ability to make choices for your self. You are not predestined to anything. Whatever you become is a result of choices you have made in the past.

Answer 5

God created us free and gave us the right to choose on our own the way of good and of virtue, or the way of sin and evil. We must remember that while God created man to be free, He did not leave him without help. Consequently, evil entered into the world exclusively through our own carelessness and not by any act of God. The divine is "altogether free of any responsibility for evil, being good by nature." Since we abused the gift of freedom, "God cannot be held responsible for the evils of Hades; we are responsible—we alone and no one else." Thus, "it cannot be said that God created death, but we ourselves, by our evil choice, have embraced death." We are the cause of our catastrophe and no one else!

Answer 6

Free-will is what you choose which is limited according to one's karma(action). Pious karma leads to happiness. Impious karma gives misery and suffering.

Even while suffering or enjoying one can create fresh good or bad karma and consequently enjoy or suffer. Creating fresh karma is withing one's free will

For instance, if one is flying in a airplane from New York to Delhi, the destination is fixed. He can do nothing about changing that karma he created which is going to Delhi. But, he exercise his free will in Airplane and execute some actions like sleeping, reading, watching movie etc. . . which in turn create another result .

Answer 7

The ability to do as I wish without outside influence.

Answer 8

Freewill is the complementary action of destiny...destiny is what we have in store for ourselves from God & Freewill is how we react to it...made simple by an example....If it is raining outside and we have a difficulty going to office its Fate..But if we decide to take an umbrella and go out it is Freewill....so we can always win over destiny by the power of freewill to make our life n birth happier...
Regards,
Amit Gupta

Answer 9

I'm tempted to answer this as I first read it as "Free Willy."

Anyways, I believe free will is the ability to choose what you do or think. I think it's what keeps us from being mindless robots.

Answer 10

Was this R & S? Free will in the theological sense has to do with whether you can look to God for salvation or not. It has nothing to do with whether you can make day-to-day decisions.